Speaking of Universities

By Stefan Collini

In recent decades there has been an immense global surge in the numbers both of universities and of students. In the UK alone there are now over 140 institutions teaching more subjects than ever to nearly 2.5 million students. New technology offers new ways of learning and teaching. Globalisation forces institutions to consider a new economic horizon. At the same time governments have systematically imposed new procedures regulating funding, governance, and assessment. Universities are being forced to behave more like business enterprises in a commercial marketplace than centres of learning.

In Speaking of Universities, historian and critic Stefan Collini analyses these changes and challenges the assumptions of policy-makers and commentators. Does "marketisation" threaten to destroy what we most value about education; does this new era of "accountability" distort what it purports to measure; and who does the modern university "belong to"? Responding to recent policies and their underlying ideology, the book is a call to "focus on what is actually happening and the cliches behind which it hides; an incitement to think again, think more clearly, and then to press for something better".

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: Feb 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781786631411

Stefan Collini

Stefan Collini is Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge University and Fellow of the British Academy. He is a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and The Nation, and he has been described by a reviewer as 'one of Britain's finest essayists and writers'. Other works include Common Writing: Essays on Literary Culture and Public Debate (2016), What Are Universities For? (2012) Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (2006), and English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (1999).

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INTRODUCTION

Hand-wringing for Beginners

There is a lot of talk about universities these days, not least because there are now a lot of universities to talk about. In recent decades there has been an immense global surge in the numbers both of universities and of students, an expansion that, in purely numerical terms, quite dwarfs anything that has happened in the previous eight centuries or so during which versions of this curious institution have existed. Although this growth has taken place across developed and developing countries alike, the numbers are, as ever, most stunning in China, where it is claimed that over 1,200 universities and colleges have been established in the last twenty years alone. In Britain, the growth of higher education has not quite been on such a dramatic scale, but even so the speed of the changes here should not be underestimated. In 1990 there were forty-six universities in the UK educating approximately 350,000 students. Twenty-six years later, following the upgrading of the former polytechnics and the founding of a whole raft of new universities, often based on an earlier college of higher education, there are now more than 140 universities (or university-level institutions) with over two million students.

However, the changes have not been merely quantitative: the whole ecology of higher education in Britain has been transformed within the past generation. Most of the procedures governing funding, assessment, ‘quality control’, ‘impact’ and so on that now occupy the greater part of the working time of academics were unknown before the mid-1980s. Forms of governance have changed no less significantly, even if these changes have been much less noticed: vestiges of academic self-government have largely been removed and replaced by the top-down control of a ‘senior management team’ implementing the latest government directives. The range of subjects that can now be studied for a degree has hugely increased. New technologies promise to alter the most basic mechanics of the teaching process. Overseas students constitute an ever-higher proportion of the student body (over a third in some institutions). Globalization has been understood to require the setting up of campuses of British universities in other countries or the founding of partnerships with overseas institutions. And all of this is quite apart from the radical reshaping since 2012 of the funding system in England and Wales, though not Scotland, whereby direct public support of teaching in higher education has been replaced by a system of high fees supported by income-contingent loans, along with other market-oriented changes such as the encouragement of ‘private providers’, including both for-profit and not-for-profit institutions.

But although all of these changes mean that there is lots to talk about, there is widespread uncertainty about the premises and terms of discussion. The pace and scale of change have produced a sense of disorientation, an uneasy feeling that, as a society, we may be losing our once-familiar understanding of the nature and role of universities yet we have not so far replaced it with anything better. The language and categories used in politics and the media when discussing higher education only exacerbate the problem: although such categories may well be appropriate to talking about, say, the economics of an animal-feed processing plant, it is hard to rid ourselves of the suspicion that they may not provide an altogether adequate model for talking about universities. Of course, there are those who will say that it doesn’t really matter how we ‘talk about’ universities, since it’s all just talk. Such people can always produce from their pockets a massive solid lump of stuff called ‘reality’, and they will proudly demonstrate how talk simply bounces off it like raindrops off a bomb-shelter. What matters, they announce with their characteristic mixture of aggression and self-satisfaction, is whether the policies work. All this talk, especially the more high-toned versions of it, is simply waffle.

As false beliefs go, this takes some beating. It would not require any particularly fancy philosophical footwork to establish that our experience of the world is in part constituted by the categories we use. Words are not a kind of decorative wrapping paper in which meaning is delivered, with the implication that they could be stripped away, or others used in their stead, without making any difference to the ‘real’ content. Concepts colonize our minds and we become used to thinking about ourselves and our world in their terms; our actions are only identifiable as this action rather than that action in terms of the language in which we describe them. In the swirling currents of assertion and assumption that make up our public discourse at any time, there are always a large number of vulgar errors passing themselves off as truisms, but the belief that words are just the decorative wrapping paper round experience is both one of the easiest to refute and one of the hardest to dislodge.

If you really believe that it doesn’t matter in the least how we talk about universities, then you probably aren’t reading this book in the first place – or, if you are, you will soon give up in irritation. But before you go, I would just like to ask you how you would decide any of the pressing policy questions about universities – what you might call undeniable ‘real world’ issues such as how to pay for them or how many people to admit to them or what to study in them and so on – without using some description of what they are like and what they do and what they are for. And if you reply that the answers to those questions are obvious and anyway are practical matters, not requiring any fancy ideas or special vocabulary, then I’d like to ask you where you think the terms in which you would frame your answers come from, because I could quickly show you that they were mostly not the descriptions used even a generation ago, let alone any further back in history. Our concepts and our language have their own histories, and the process by which one pattern of using them comes to be dominant at any given time is something that intellectual historians can chart with considerable precision. There is nothing ‘natural’ or given about thinking of universities in terms of, say, ‘social mobility’ or ‘wealth-creation’ any more than there was about thinking of them in terms of ‘character-formation’ or ‘the propagation of God’s word’.

So it most certainly does matter how we talk about these things. It is, of course, easy for any set of critical reflections to be stigmatized as mere ‘hand-wringing’ – as bemoaning the fallen state of the times or ineffectually lamenting that the world is not a more agreeable place – but on this topic at this time that charge does seem particularly wide of the mark. We need to be able to articulate an understanding of what universities are for that is adequate to our time if we are to be able to decide what to do. This does not mean being committed to resisting change or to clinging to how things were done the day before yesterday, still less to denying the fundamental forces in the world that are bound to affect the character and functioning of universities. Quite the contrary, in fact. If things were not changing so quickly, we might manage to hobble along leaving our working assumptions implicit, not needing to be exposed, scrutinized and developed. But we’re most emphatically not in that position. We simply have to talk about these general matters because the changes we are experiencing are so extensive and so fundamental that we cannot any longer feel confident that we have any working assumptions that are widely agreed. To adapt the title of a recently successful novel and film: We Need To Talk About Universities.

This book is clearly in some sense a continuation of, or sequel to, What Are Universities For?, which was published in 2012. Although it will be evident that both books are informed by the same perspective and are campaigning against a sustained nexus of misconceptions, all the pieces re-worked in this book were written after the completion of its predecessor and are thus addressed to somewhat different circumstances; they do not merely repeat the case made there. As the title of this Introduction is intended (with due irony) to suggest, the present book offers a compendium of arguments, expressed in various literary forms, in the hope that readers will find them usable both for clarifying their own minds and for deploying in discussion with others. For these reasons, it has seemed worth trying to preserve at least some of the variety of form that might be pertinent to different kinds of public discussion of this topic, even at the expense of occasional repetition of the main points. Where the date or occasion of a chapter’s first appearance is integral to its meaning, I briefly indicate this, and then in the Acknowledgements I provide full details of the occasions for which earlier versions of these chapters were first written. Only the three chapters in Part II (and some parts of the Appendix) have been published before, mostly in somewhat shortened forms; the remaining eight chapters have not previously appeared in print in any form.

Inevitably, some of what I have said in these more recent contributions has been affected by the response to What Are Universities For? That the book should have provoked favourable, indeed enthusiastic, reviews, letters and other responses from a substantial number of academics in British universities was perhaps not entirely surprising (and not necessarily attributable to any merits on its part). The book does, after all, attempt to articulate a set of assumptions about universities that are, or were, broadly familiar, as well as addressing a range of anxieties that are widespread in such settings. But I was particularly struck by the positive responses I received from three other groups.

The first were students, both undergraduate and postgraduate. Students, whose direct relation with their university is more shortlived than that of most academics, have many other demands on their attention during that short period and often prefer to ignore these larger questions while they pursue a good degree or a good job or a good time. Even those who do get engaged by questions arising from contemporary higher education policy can sometimes be impatient with the kind of extended reflection that doesn’t seem to issue in immediately effective action. But I have been impressed, and encouraged, by the range and vitality of the student responses I have encountered, not least by the often-voiced conviction that our society needs to articulate a more inspiring sense of the larger purpose of education than is represented by graphs of post-degree earnings.

The second group was made up of general readers and members of audiences who were not university teachers or students (and had, it emerged in many cases, not themselves been to university), but who simply cared about the future of these institutions, quite often because they wanted their children to enjoy what they still hoped would be general educational as well as career benefits. I have been struck by how many of these people have an intuitive sense that university policy may have taken a wrong turn in recent years, with the result that something they once valued or esteemed about such institutions, even if from afar, might now be jeopardized.

And the third group were readers from continental Europe, some of them academics or academic administrators, but also including journalists and other commentators. Of all the positive responses, this was the one I had least anticipated, but after a number of visits to speak in various European countries some of the reasons for it became more obvious. Very often my interlocutors and audiences were people who had admired the British university system, but who could see that it was now being treated as the guinea pig in a series of market-fundamentalist experiments. Most northern European countries still maintain a publicly supported system of higher education where, whatever the precise financial arrangements, universities are regarded as a public good, even in some countries as the bearers of civic or republican values. Many European colleagues were clearly worried that business-driven governments might in the future try to impose policies modelled along the new British lines in their own countries; therefore, furnishing themselves with an array of considered arguments against such marketization could seem both prudent and relatively urgent.

Part of what was refreshing about the responses of these three groups was their freedom from two sets of attitudes that are depressingly familiar in Britain. The first is a rather resentful touchiness that damns any confident expression of intellectual seriousness as ‘elitist’, ‘condescending’, ‘superior’, ‘lofty’ and so on. Complicated forms of reverse snobbery may be at work here. There have been moments when it seemed that the only information people needed to make up their minds about what I must be saying was that I was a ‘professor’ and I taught at ‘Cambridge’, two culturally loaded markers from which the patronizing or condescending character of my views could readily be deduced. Online message threads, following an article or review, seem to have licensed the expression of such formulaic resentments in a particularly venomous form.

The second familiar attitude, mentioned earlier, is that of those who pride themselves on their ‘realism’ and are correspondingly dismissive of ‘utopianism’ or any alleged failure to understand ‘how the world really works’. This attitude is particularly found among some of those who have navigated a career path through quangos and the higher levels of university administration. More than once I have been reminded of Thorstein Veblen’s sarcastic little riff, now a century old (I quote it in full in Chapter 3, below), on the types who tended to become university leaders in the United States at the time: ‘a plausible speaker with a large gift of assurance, … some urbane pillar of society, some astute veteran of the scientific demi-monde will meet all reasonable requirements’. There are, needless to say, some people of outstanding quality and integrity in such senior positions, attempting to do a difficult job as well as possible in unfavourable circumstances. But looking round the room at any meeting of representatives of universities convened for the purpose of putting a case to ministers and their officials or making up a panel at a policy-oriented event, it is usually impossible not to recognize ‘some astute veteran of the scientific demi-monde’. The response of such individuals to my book and related writings on universities has essentially consisted of patting me on the head and telling me to run along now: serious matters should be left to the grown-ups.

In addition to reviews, an author is bound to encounter a series of more informal or conversational reactions to what he or she has written (the ready availability of an academic’s email address has perhaps increased the volume of such communications). Apart from various kinds of heartening response, I have been struck by two themes in these comments. The first involved people in asserting that although no doubt what I said was true, the fact was that it wouldn’t make any difference, that it was just so much spitting into the wind (or some less genteel version of that phrase). The individuals who put some version of that view to me did not, unlike the self-satisfied ‘realists’ I mentioned earlier, appear to take any pleasure from this fact – indeed, they appeared dejected and resigned. But clearly there are quite a few people, both within British universities and in society more generally, who feel that it is now too late. The changes pushed through in recent years, it is claimed, have a bullish and triumphant political ideology behind them which is now so powerful that nothing can be done to turn back the tide. Obviously, the fact of my having written extended criticisms of these changes indicates that I do not wholly agree with this pessimistic diagnosis, but I have to acknowledge that it has a good deal of empirical evidence on its side, and in my darker moments I don’t find it easy to know what any light at the end of the political tunnel would even look like, let alone feel any confidence that I have spotted it.

And the second set of responses – by which I admit I was, perhaps naively, rather shocked – consisted in the interlocutor or correspondent telling me that although they entirely agreed with what I had said or written, they did not feel that they could risk saying these things in this way in their own university. Is this paranoia or some other form of exaggeration on their part, or have things come to such a sad pass in their institutions? I had no way of telling in these particular cases, but such comments have reinforced my conviction that the largely obvious truths which I have attempted to set out need to be repeated – repeated in different settings, repeated in different forms, but repeated sufficiently often that they cease to seem eccentric or purely personal, and that they instead come to take on at least some of that air of familiarity that has been acquired by the officially endorsed commonplaces they seek to challenge.

And then there are the responses that only reach one at third hand or by hearsay – such as the reported embarrassment at having a colleague who seems to be kicking up a fuss, or the anxiety that such polemics risk antagonizing ministers and their officials and thus jeopardizing a future funding settlement. I would be sorry to think that universities, of all places, encouraged such cowed or craven attitudes, but in any case such responses seem to me to exaggerate the amount of attention likely to be accorded any piece of writing by an ordinary academic, as well as, I would like to believe, underestimating the seriousness of purpose and the intellectual openness of the best politicians and civil servants. A related response, which I think is usually expressed in good faith and which I take more seriously, is that, when discussing important public matters, lively engaged writing should be avoided since it can all too easily misfire. In some cases, it is suggested, this may be because any kind of humour or wit risks alienating rather than persuading, especially if it flirts with satire or irony. In other cases, it is argued that very close attention to the language of a policy proposal or other official document runs the danger of seeming both nit-picking and superior, with the critic simply scoring a number of cheap victories at the expense of writing that made no claim to literary polish in the first place. And, more generally, these views are often rolled up into an overarching disapproval of writing that seems to be ‘too critical’ or ‘too adversarial’: such writing, it is said (invoking a term favoured by grave persons who are confident of their own judiciousness), is ‘not helpful’.

I take this view, or cluster of views, seriously because any reflections on the ways in which particular literary tactics do or do not achieve their ends can be valuable, and authors themselves are notoriously bad judges of where their own writing voice may go astray or even be counter-productive. But after a good deal of reflection I have to say that, in its generalized form, this set of objections seems to me to misunderstand the purposes and demands of the genres at issue. The shortest way to make the point is to say that such writing is not meant to be ‘helpful’ – at least, not in the sense of the limited practical suggestion that is made when a committee round a table is trying to improve a particular measure or proposal. I have spent plenty of time in such settings: I understand how a suggestion needs to be couched if it is to get a serious hearing there, but I also know how limited is the range of considerations that are felt to be ‘relevant’ or ‘constructive’ in such circumstances. Criticism, fundamental criticism, is doing something different. Sometimes such criticism may be saying: ‘The present terms of the discussion systematically exclude what, from another point of view, would be seen as fundamental.’ There are times when criticism needs to be swingeing if such criticism is to be attended to at all: in these situations, trying in the approved way to be ‘helpful’ will simply allow the existing consensus to deceive itself that it has considered relevant objections and decided against them – this is the lie at the heart of so many exercises in ‘consultation’.

But, more pertinently still, none of the writing at issue here has taken the form of a memo or a policy statement to be circulated to members of a committee. We are talking, rather, about forms of journalism or other kinds of writing and speaking addressed to diverse audiences. Such writing needs to attract and hold the interest of its intended readers, and moments of wit or rhetorical invention can, when properly handled, be very valuable for that purpose (whether I have managed to do that successfully or not is another question). A wholly impersonal, impeccably judicious distillation of a position may be admirable from some points of view, but will it have achieved its ends if no one reads it, no one finishes it, or indeed if it fails to get published in the first place? Questions of tone and address are, of course, matters of judgement, and any author may get them wrong in particular instances. But we should not be too quick to assume that a certain high-spiritedness is axiomatically out of place in writing about such topics. An ‘idea of the university’ that can only be expounded in dull prose is failing its topic.

So, much of this book is based on talks, lectures, articles and other interventions that were not always expressed in sober, pinstriped prose. Readers will, as ever, form their own judgement about how interesting or persuasive such writing is. But I hope that they will recognize that some such variety of literary genres and prose voices is both necessary and appropriate where the ambition is to get a wider public to attend to questions which are otherwise in danger of not being attended to or even properly identified. In modern multi-media societies, the received wisdom and its often clichéd forms of expression enjoy huge advantages in public debate. Views and phrases that are so ceaselessly reiterated come to be part of the cultural weather, so ‘natural’ as almost to escape notice, certainly to escape challenge. This book is intended as a small incitement to focus on what is actually happening and the clichés behind which it hides; an incitement to think again, think more clearly, and then to press for something better.

PART I

ANALYSES

CHAPTER 1

What’s Happening to Universities?

Historical and Comparative Perspectives

I

Readers will doubtless have noticed how, in the past two or three decades, businesses across the world have been pressured into making themselves look more and more like universities. Companies have been exhorted to abandon commercial competition and to model their behaviour on patterns of scholarly collaboration. Stock-market-listed corporations now have to make returns detailing the intellectual and scholarly value of their products and services. Targets and benchmarks are being replaced by informed judgement; HR divisions are shrinking; and companies are doing less self-advertising and producing fewer glossy brochures. They have also had to adopt a more collegiate and bottom-up form of governance; CEOs are increasingly being replaced by committees drawn from the professoriate, and places on major companies’ Boards of Directors have been reserved for experienced Senior Lecturers in Medieval History.

At first sight, it may seem obvious why the changes that are actually taking place are the exact reverse of those I have just fancifully sketched. It has become almost commonplace to observe how universities are now subject to ‘incessant hectoring’ for their failure to be more like businesses. But it is worth reminding ourselves that capitalism had, in some form, been around a long time before the recent epidemic of business-envy. We should not fall into ahistorical essentializing where either capitalism or universities are concerned – and there is more to be said about the changes over time in both – but in some form they had managed to coexist for a century or more without universities being required to adopt the goals, structures or procedures of corporations, or at least of some business-school model of how corporations should be run. Indeed, for about 150 years after universities started to assume something like their modern form in the early nineteenth century, the fact that they represented in some sense an alternative ethic or antidote to the commercial world was precisely one of the justifications for their existence. This was a view shared even by those who have retrospectively been cited as the champions of applied science, such as T.H. Huxley, who declared in 1894: ‘The primary business of universities has to do merely with pure knowledge and pure art – independent of all application to practice; with the advancement of culture and not with the increase of wealth or commodities.’ This conception was endorsed by one of the iconic leaders of that commercial world, Joseph Chamberlain, Mayor of Birmingham as well as, later, a cabinet minister, who greeted the establishment in his fiefdom of what was to become the University of Birmingham by saying: ‘To place a university in the middle of a great industrial and manufacturing population is to do something to leaven the whole mass with higher aims and higher intellectual ambitions than would otherwise be possible to people engaged entirely in trading and commercial pursuits.’ And something similar was reasserted in the most downright terms by Ernest Rutherford, the Nobel-winning ‘father of nuclear physics’, when he warned the University of Bristol in 1927 that he ‘would view as an unmitigated disaster the utilization of university laboratories for research bearing on industry’.

I cite those views precisely because they sound so unimaginably distant from the assumptions about relations between universities and the economy that we increasingly take for granted, though they were a strong, perhaps even the dominant, strain in thinking about universities well into the second half of the twentieth century, especially in Britain and British-influenced parts of the world. But they were never, of course, the only strain even there, for versions of the conflict between those asserting priority for practical concerns and those claiming to represent non-instrumental values have a very long history. The fact is that what societies have wanted from their universities has been historically variable, internally contradictory, and only ever partly attainable. We should certainly begin by recognizing that universities have always in part served practical ends and have always helped to prepare their graduates for employment in later life. Once upon a time their primary role was to teach true religion and provide learned men for the church; once upon another time it was to inculcate virtue or judgement or good manners or any of the other supposed attributes of a gentleman; once upon yet another time it was to select, equip and mould those who were to fill leading positions in state, empire or society; and often it was as much to keep the young out of mischief as to keep alive the flame of learning. What, if anything, therefore, is distinctive about the changes of the last two or three decades? Are critics exaggerating and are the changes just one more mutation in the continuing story of how universities necessarily adapt to serve society’s changing needs, or is there something distinctive going on that may do longer-term damage than we currently realize? Perhaps this is where historical and comparative perspectives may help. But first I must warn readers that this chapter contains material of an ethically explicit nature. For, if we confine ourselves to the language of the company report, with its relentlessly upbeat account of productivity, income streams, commercial partnerships and international ventures, then we shall have no way to distinguish the activities of universities from those of the business corporations in whose image they are being remade.

II

From the early nineteenth century onwards, it was the Humboldtian ideal that did most to shape universities over the next 150 years. This emphasized the pursuit and transmission of knowledge and its elaboration into Wissenschaft: the professional autonomy of the scholar was essential to this model, and teaching was often conceived as a form of apprenticeship. But alongside various forms of preparation for employment, two further ideals complicated this conception of the university as the protected home of free enquiry. The collegiate ideal focused on close student–teacher relations in a residential setting with character-formation as the aim, whether through inspirational teaching, athletic endeavour or the contagion of one’s peers. And the civic ideal prioritized the making of citizens, the inculcation of a shared ethic, whether elite or republican or democratic, that involved developing talents and forms of expertise that were to help define and strengthen the identity of the polity. Most of the universities of continental Europe involved some mixture of the Humboldtian and civic ideals; the English tradition, deriving from Oxbridge, though not the distinctive Scottish tradition, tended to foreground the collegiate ideal, while different types of institution in the US managed to accommodate all three in various proportions.

But at the heart of the implicit contract between university and society in all these places was an acceptance that the distinctive value of the higher learning lay in its cultivation of those forms of scholarship, science and culture whose relation to the instrumental and mundane concerns of practical life was indirect and long term, even at times downright antagonistic. It also entailed granting those who pursued such enquiries a degree of professional autonomy, a convention made to seem